(Image: SPD)
The Seattle City Council approved legislation Tuesday opening the way for a Seattle Police crackdown on public drug use on the city’s streets while doing more to emphasize diversion and treatment.
The 6-3 vote fell as expected with District 2 representative Tammy Morales, and District 3 leader Kshama Sawant joined by citywide councilmember Teresa Mosqueda in opposing the bill.
“There is real urgency to make critical investments to address the challenges facing people trapped in cycles of crisis, substance use, criminalization and housing instability, as well as genuine issues shared with me by frontline workers and neighbors impacted by the drug crisis,” Mosqueda said following Tuesday’s vote. “I have always advocated—and will continue to advocate—to address the root causes that lead to addiction, get neighbors the treatment they desperately need, and prevent public use. This bill, without expanding diversion capacity, won’t accomplish that.”
Sara Nelson, the other citywide rep on the council and sponsor of the original bill focused on City Attorney Ann Davison’s prosecution that was rejected by the council this summer, celebrated the passage. “The drug crisis we see playing out on our streets is the most crushing public health and safety issue of our time,” Nelson said. “We have a moral obligation to do everything within our power to reverse this devastating loss of life and associated community harms – including police intervention.”
Mayor Bruce Harrell said Tuesday he will sign the bill as soon as possible and issue an executive order to clarify how Seattle Police should enforce the new law after the council rejected an amendment Tuesday that would have directed an officer “to both make an assessment of threat of harm to others and make an attempt to divert when an individual only poses a threat of harm to themselves” under the new law.
The change will enable the City Attorney’s Office to prosecute drug use and possession on Seattle’s streets. Drug prosecution has been left to the county where the prosecutor’s office has said it does not have the resources to charge people arrested under the state’s new harsher penalties for low-level drug crimes.
The new Seattle law will incorporate elements of statewide changes allowing the city attorney to prosecute a wider spectrum of drug cases while adding new policies about arrests, plus tying funding for treatment and services to the legislation by shuffling $27 million in budgeted spending toward enhanced treatment facilities, new addiction services, and improved overdose response for first responders including $7 million this year in capital investments in facilities to provide services such as post-overdose care, opioid medication delivery, health hub services, long-term care management, and drop-in support.
Groups like the Downtown Seattle Association and the Seattle Police Officers Guild union strongly criticized officials for being slow to respond to new state law making low level drug crimes in Washington a gross misdemeanor and giving the state a harder stance on drug law penalties. Nelson criticized her fellow councilmembers Tuesday for taking nearly six months after her original proposal to pass the final legislation.
Meanwhile, efforts to legislatte larger alternatives to arrest including safe consumption sites have been stalled in the city and county for most of the past decade.
This week’s approval reverses a 5-4 summer vote against a first push for the legislation that fell short with downtown representative Andrew Lewis joining the “no” contingent in rejecting the previous bill. Lewis said he voted against the legislation that would have enabled the city attorney to prosecute drug use and possession on Seattle’s streets over the plan’s lack of investment in city resources for treatment and diversion and a history of drug enforcement that has consistently and disproportionately targeted people of color and the homeless. The councilmember co-sponsored the update brought in front of the full council and approved Tuesday and sided with the “yes” vote. But Lewis also acknowledged the new law is unlikely to fully solve Seattle’s problems with street disorder.
“I will be the first person to acknowledge this is not going to be a panacea to solve every single problem that is associated with the fentanyl epidemic,” Lewis said.
Along with new powers of prosecution, City Hall will be challenged to build up arrest alternatives quickly. The city will also need develop a successor therapeutic court to Community Court after Davison removed her office’s support for the program this summer.
City council analysis says the new law will produce an unknown increase in cases handled by the city attorney’s office — and costs related to the prosecution. “The number of cases charged would be the primary driver of costs, and the decision whether to charge a case lies within the discretion of the prosecuting authority,” the analysis (PDF) reads. “The more cases charged, the more costs are likely to increase.”
For diversion and treatment, the Harrell administration says it will use funding from opioid lawsuit settlements “resulting from the City’s efforts to hold large pharmaceutical companies accountable” to dedicate $20 million toward “a long-term multi-year strategy and plan to increase treatment and overdose response services” and “access to mobile opioid medication delivery, and harm reduction services.”
The funding would also boost the Seattle Fire Department’s new “post overdose response team.”
HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.
Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.
We need a lot more Council members like Sara Nelson. If you want Seattle to stop circling the drain, vote out Lewis, Morales and Strauss.
To be fair, Sara is kinda batshit crazy, but I agree that we need more moderate voices. She’s not the ideal example, but we do certainly need someone to represent at least a portion of her politics.
Yes, but especially Morales.
Sara Nelson, the anti-worker psychopath who beats the long failed War on Drugs drum?
Yeah, no thanks, the drug situation is bad enough. Luckily, she’ll be voted out in two years.
Not as obvious as you think Obvious. Very Trumpian of you to label our elected officials psychopaths. Based on what, I wonder? Why not just start calling her ‘Crazy Sara’ and unapologetically join the Republican race to the bottom? And while reasonable people can disagree about whether to criminalize open hard drug use, the moderate left solutions offered by Nelson are a far cry from the war on drugs you so cynically refer to. Nelson will most likely win re-election in two years if she offers herself up for four more years laboring on a disfunctional Council. I hope she does, and I also hope she has more similarly minded Councilmembers to lunch with in the future.
Obvious is right, and Crazy Sara is catchy. What’s funny is Sara has a lot more in common with Trump than Sawant, or any one on Council really.
Well to start, she fired a bunch of brewery workers in just before the 2020 holiday season and lied about it, yet pocketed almost $2 million of PPP. Shouldn’t be surprising that she’s also opposed pro-worker benefits such as $15 minimum wage, consistent scheduling and FML. And of course there was her gaffe where she vocally opposed the Council supporting City workers attempting to unionizing.
Until we offer easily accessible drug treatment programs (and no, we aren’t even close), this will have the same effect as the War on Drugs™ has done for a half-century: generating drug addicts that now have criminal records. The fact that this is being spearheaded by Nelson, with Ann “Tough on Crime” Davison’s glowing support is all you need to know.
The only way she will win is if she faces another weak candidate. After she’s shown her true colors, there will be no shortage of people lining up to challenge her. She’ll be lucky to survive the primary.
Labeling someone a “psychopath” is obviously wrong/hyperbole, and immediately causes many people to ignore all of your posts.
In most cases I would agree with you, but normal people don’t fire workers around the holidays, then proceed to blatantly lie to the public about it, while collecting money meant to keep those same people employed.
Her type of politics don’t belong in pro-worker Seattle. She’s better off in the Deep South or maybe New Jersey.
Sara Nelson is godawful what are you talking about? She is the worst on the council and makes even worse beer.
Love how SPD wants a big parade every time they post Big Scarwy Dwugs pictures on Twitter. I can’t stand the bootlicking they expect of citizens. Police departments need to stop posting on social media entirely.
Yes, let them be defined entirely by their adversaries, who under your bright scenario would enjoy unlimited social media access and the right thereby to define the issues for discussion and recognition.
Built on sand, this will eventually collapse under it’s own weight. It may, however, hand the police a new public truncheon extending beyond original intent.
Is this gonna get messy? Can some body explain the level of empathy we as citizens of Seattle have towards seeing these laws in action. And is there a treatment path for this newer opioid on the streets?
Putting a safe injection site in a neighborhood is like planting a bomb. It will destroy everything around. We must fight the lie of “safe injection” sites like our lives depend on it. If the “harm reduction” zealots succeed in inflicting their social experiment on the community, Capitol Hill will become the Tenderloin in San Francisco or East Hastings street in Vancouver. It is very different conditions in Europe where they strictly enforce laws (no camping, no public drug use, no stealing). Here it would obviously turn an open air drug market into a government sanctioned brick and mortar drug market.
That sounds like a significant improvement. There are already a couple of “government sanctioned brick and mortar drug markets” down the street, not to mention a government sanctioned brick and mortar liquor market. It’s fine.
“It is very different conditions in Europe where they strictly enforce laws (no camping, no public drug use, no stealing).”
European countries tend to have easily accessible drug treatment programs and welfare programs that actually work and aren’t used as political footballs every four years.
Not to mention, in Europe, drug users aren’t thrown in jail as a first resort, which the has been the case in the US for over 50 years now and has directly resulted in the crisis we’re experiencing today.
Not even a direct comparison. You want to fix the problem, eliminate the failed War on Drugs and fund treatment programs. All the War on Drugs had gotten is are drug addicts that now have criminal records for drug use and our society is extremely harsh on people with criminal records.
More bs leftist talking points. The current drug encampment dystopia with skyrocketing overdose deaths, street disorder and crime in west coast cities was caused by the failed policies pushed by people like you, not the “war on drugs” boogie man. Europe has society norms and values and a pride of place that would never allow public spaces to be taken over and trashed by addicts. They would be arrested and removed from the park. Have you been to Europe?
Which policies might those be? You call my comment “bs leftist talking points”, but don’t bother to refute them, which is typically the signal that a right wing blog troll has nothing to say.
I’ll offer another policy that is directly related to the current crisis: 60 years of tax cuts on the wealthy. They said something would trickle down and enough people convinced themselves that it would be wealth and not despair and misery.
I’m glad to see you’ve come full circle in your comment to agree with my comment.
I find it bizarre that Seattle leftists fixate on 1980s policies of the Reagan era: “trickle down economics”, “closing mental hospitals” and “the war on drugs” as an excuse for the 2023 Seattle sh*tshow. Since then we have had multiple democratic presidents and total control of state and local politics by increasingly radical left leaning politicians. Where are the evidenced-based results you promised for your harm reduction, legalize drugs, stop the sweeps, housing first, and criminal justice reform policies? Where did the billions go that taxpayers gave to the homeless industrial complex? Take your head out of the sand or at least stop with the gaslighting.
If you can’t see how the deregulation of all industries, and the complete dismantling of social support systems that have swept through the country with so much of Reagan’s rhetoric, then you are clearly the one with your head in the sand. Should we talk about the poorly regulated pharmaceutical companies that have acted like defacto international drug cartels and creating a zombie-like apocalypse in our country? Reagan’s war on drug really seems to be working as planned right? 🙄
Because those policies have had long lasting effects, nationwide beyond Seattle, and there has been no effort to reverse them. I’d be curious to hear your reasoning of how those policies DON’T have an effect on society today.
I don’t have any because none of those policies have been put in place.
Here’s where you show your true colors. Only very gullible people, and the people spreading blatant lies to these gullible people, believe in the “homeless industrial complex”. There is none. What you’re seeing is that it’s going to take a lot of money to solve the problem. What we are throwing at it is a fraction of what it will take, meaning the problem persists.
You’re spreading good advice, but not taking your own.
It’s a first step, but it’ll only help if there’s enforcement. I don’t why we got so lax on this, or why others think it’s okay to take drugs openly.I recall seeing people 40, even 30 years ago, busted for drinking alcohol openly on the street. See what happens when you let things get slack? You can’t even wait at the 4th & Pike bus stop after sunset because of all the drug users there. Why are people okay with this?
We spent a ton of energy on eliminating the practice of jailing people that have addiction problems. This is humane. People should not be stuck in confinement with murderers because of addiction. That said, going whole hog on letting anyone sell any drug and do any drug in public is a recipe for squalor. Ask any business owner in Seattle.
I have no idea what the actual solutions are, but I was really surprised at how much effort the police told me it would take to get a repeatedly trespassing junkie off my property, from me having to confront them on video to me having to file a protective order against him. I know the dude has problems and needs help, but his problems should not have to become my problems. He’s not a family member or a spouse, yet it took a ridiculous amount of effort on my part before the issue was resolved, and even now, I’m not sure how long it’s resolved for. They told me he could be back out any day now.
The legislation promises increased ““access to mobile opioid medication delivery,”
What is this, exactly? I hope it refers to the availability of Narcan, and not a service which delivers opioids to addicts on our streets.
The only thing that will happen is people will die at the hands of the police in a host of new confrontations with spd enabled by this policy. Some will cheer because they hate homeless people and others will rightfully say “I told you so” and the pages will continue to turn in a never ending saga to corral all humans into the economy.
finally some common sense. too bad there’s only one candidate in the D3 race who supports common sense.